That’s just off the top of my head. I’ll add many more to this list in the future, so check back. Also, if you have any other old acid-folk, drone, electronic, electro-acoustic, free jazz, gamelan, krautrock, musique concrète, minimalism, obscure psychedelic, sound-art, etc. LPs that you want to sell, let me know.

I’d like to share with you my list of desert island recordings, in alphabetical order. Each album had to meet at least several of these “requirements”—to be sincere, creative, inventive, spiritual, mind- and consciousness-expanding, outward-bound, chance-taking, non-commercial, with loads of historical significance and unique personal vision. I hope someday you’ll try to listen to at least a few. Thanks for reading.

Fushitsusha at the Table of the Elements Yttrium Festival in Chicago, Illinois, November 1996.

Hmm, I didn’t know that anyone was allowed to construct an entire sound-realm of their very own that is fascinatingly bent, absolutely one-of-kind and deeply personal. Since the early 1970s, Tokyo Japan’s Keiji Haino has been busy doing precisely that. Outfitting himself all in black with matching waist-length hair plus bangs and permanent sunglasses, Haino’s youthful hormones first exploded with Lost Aaraaff, which was a really crazed, free jazz-inspired trio who pushed out truckloads of piano, drums and shrill, screaming, hyperventilating vocals back in 1971. After dissolving that group, Haino started up another one in 1978 called Fushitsusha. Although it has lapsed in and out of various stages of existence for 20 years, this band has worked consistently to explode galaxy class improv-rock heaviness since the release of their debut 2-LP in 1989.

Other more recent ensembles count Haino as a member, too: the Japanese folk blues and noise improv of Vajra, with Mikami Kan and Toshiaki Ishizuka; the free-flowing, dark improv of Black Stage; and Aihiyo, who play skewed versions of traditional Japanese pop songs. As if that weren’t enough, an ever-growing molten lava flow of his solo and collaboration CDs has been flooding hundreds of bedrooms since the early ’90s, along with live appearances around the world, solidifying Keiji Haino as the premier name in experimental subtlety and your blatant hearing loss. Follow the links below to view categories that function as a veritable “buyer’s guide” of all known official output by Japan’s dark “star.” Thanks for listening.

Rich Jacobs at the Move 2 art show opening at New Image Art in Los Angeles, California, 1998. Photo by Pat D.

What do you lust for?
Wow. Maybe nothing or something simple and mundane, like looking at interesting photographs, older printing processes, design and different approaches to designing things, layouts, funny or strange fonts, good cropping jobs. Bad choices are fun sometimes, too. I go to record and bookstores to try to see as much as I can, on purpose. I guess, really, the answer is I have to see new things constantly, or I have to at least look at things, so I would probably say anything visual that looks earnest, amazing, interesting, dull, extra-boring, accidental, handmade things that have imperfections or traces left of humans having had contact with them.

The early bird, I mean minimalist catches, I mean gets the worm, I mean word in edgewise–or actually a lot of words in all over the lengthy liner notes of numerous LPs and CDs. Tony Conrad is one such large, flightless bird. From 1962 to 1965, he played violin in minimalist music founder La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music group, also known as the Dream Syndicate, which included La Monte and Marian Zazeela on drone vocals, John Cale on viola and Angus MacLise on percussion. Since La Monte’s been keeping the tapes “safe” in storage since the mid ’60s–for the most part denying access and copies to the other group members and the public at large–very few people outside of the original small audiences have ever heard what must have surely been the most searing, transporting drone music of all time. Practicing regularly, the group developed into the most awesome unit of 4:00 a.m. hover power. Perfect pitch, just intonation, long durations and massive amplification of the vocals, viola and percussion to tympanic membrane-cutting levels were some of the ingredients of this galaxy hub-bound stew.

For 60 years now, avant-garde composers and musical outsiders alike have tried to flex your head—electronically.

Iannis Xenakis.

In the middle of the 20th Century, a small handful of avant-garde classical composers crumpled up the graph paper of conventional music reality and threw it very far away. In Paris, Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry developed a stunning new form of music in 1948 called musique concrète. By mixing together sound effects records via multiple turntables through a disc lathe, new platters of abrupt, sound collage chaos resulted. With the advent of magnetic tape recorders in the early ’50s, the process was made a lot easier, setting composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen in Germany, Iannis Xenakis in France, plus Vladimir Ussachevsky, John Cage and Edgard Varèse in the United States free to exploit the novel sounds of new electronic equipment and / or recorded acoustic sounds from the outside world–hence the term “electro-acoustic.” Immense realms of abstract, alien sound and dark, dissonant collage pushed out the boundaries of what music could be, predating the use of electronics, concrete sounds, tape manipulation, feedback and noise in popular music by over a decade.